Ohio Breweries by Rick Armon

As the seventh annual Ohio Brew Week wraps up Saturday in Athens, here’s a rundown of my personal “Ohio Brew Day.” I spent Thursday in Athens on a whirlwind tour of the community chatting with brewers, beer drinkers, bar owners and the new Miss Plumber’s Crack.

Blank Slate Brewing Co., a new production brewery in Cincinnati, is open and selling its draft beer to area bars and restaurants.

The brewery, located in an industrial building near Lunken Airport, has three beers available: Movin' On, an American session ale; Pour...Wait...Repeat, a summer wheat; and Ryesing Up, a rye saison with peppercorns.

The Moerlein Lager House has started offering Cincinnati beer heritage and brewery tours starting at 10 a.m. every Saturday and Sunday. The 75-minute tour features a presentation in the brewery by a brewer; and a program directing guests through the brewpub, which is filled with historical photos, documents and other memorabilia. The cost is $10 and includes two commemorative beer tokens that can be redeemed for draft beer.

The brewpub also is promoting the "Saloons, Cellars & Sin Tour" in the city's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. The tour includes visits to Arnold's Bar & Grill, the city's oldest continually operating saloon; and a trip into the subterranean cellars that were part of the Gerke Brewery complex. The cost is $20. The tours are given at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturdays into September. For more details, click here.

Forget about keeping up with the Jones. It'd be better to hang with the Millers. MillerCoors is handing out gift cards for a free case of Miller Lite to anybody named Miller -- first name, middle name or last name -- as part of an "It's Miller Time On Us" promotion. Of course, you have to be of legal drinking age.

Millers can stop by one of nine cities -- including Cincinnati -- hosting the special giveaway. They will receive a $25 It's Miller Time gift card after showing proper identification. Gift cards are limited to one per person and must be collected within the hours of the event.

The Brick Brewing Co., Ontario, Canada’s first craft brewer, is using the Akron-Canton area as a springboard to launch its beers into the U.S. market. Local drinkers are getting the first sips of Waterloo Dark, IPA and Amber, and Laker Lager after the brewery teamed up with Esber Beverage Co. in Canton.

Esber, which sought out the brewery, is the only distributor in the country now selling the brands. It’s available in area bars, restaurants and many supermarkets. Brick President and Chief Executive Officer George Croft and Chief Technical Officer Russell Tabata met with bar owners and chatted with the Akron Beacon Journal last week during an Akron Aeros game at Canal Park, where their beer is sold.

Dayton Daily News writer Mark Fisher has a story today about a new brewpub co-op hoping to open in Dayton. The Fifth Street Brewpub in the city's St. Anne's Hill neighborhood is seeking people to invest $100 in the venture to get off the ground.

The brewpub hopes to have 300 charter members by July 31. “That will be a trigger point,” co-founder Brian Young told the newspaper. “We don’t want to start spending money before we know there’s interest in this concept and that it’s ready to go forward.”

The first Craft @ the Quarry NWO Hopheads Craft Brew Festival will be held from 7 p.m. to midnight Aug. 3 at the Centennial Terrace, an outdoor concert venue and spring-fed swimming facility in Sylvania..

Four Ohio homebrewers won top awards in the National Homebrew Competition, the largest beer competition in the world sponsored by the American Homebrewers Association. Winners were announced Saturday at the National Homebrewers Conference in Seattle. Overall, there were 7,800 entries in 28 style categories.

Chris Hopkins is the brewmaster at the Marietta Brewing Co. in Marietta. He took over the operation of the brewpub late last year. But that’s not all he does. He also is the head brewer at the North End Tavern & Brewery in nearby Parkersburg, W.Va., meaning he’s pulling double brewing duty in two different cities on two different brewing systems.

His beer epiphany occurred in England eight years ago. Paul Fryman, then an Allegheny College student studying abroad, discovered pub after pub serving different, tastier brews than the Busch Light and Natural Light that he’d been exposed to growing up in West Salem.

Fryman, an economics major, became captivated by the brewing industry, especially after discovering craft beer when he returned from overseas. He wrote his senior thesis on the "economics of beer" and realized that his real passion was beer and not economics.

Zymurgy magazine, published by the American Homebrewers Association, has released its rankings of the best beers and best breweries in America for 2012. The rankings are based on feedback from readers, who are asked each year to select their favorite 20 beers. A record 16,445 votes were cast this year.

A couple Ohio-made beers made the list. Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter came in tied for 48th. Samuel Adams Boston Lager was tied for 31st and Samuel Adams Noble Pils was tied for 44th. Samuel Adams has a brewery in Cincinnati.

Elevator Brewing Co. -- which operates both a production brewery and a restaurant in downtown Columbus -- is expanding distribution throughout southeast Ohio. The brewery has signed on with Southeast Beverage Co. in Athens to handle its beers.

House of LaRose and Acme Fresh Market spent six hours building a Budweiser tank Tuesday at the Acme store in Coventry Township in suburban Akron. The tank is a salute to the troops and part of Anheuser-Busch's effort to raise $2.5 million to support the Folds of Honor Foundation, which helps veterans. Here's the tank:

Gavin Meyers and Tim Ward learned an important lesson while getting their masters of business administration degrees from The Ohio State University: Look for underserved markets when launching any business venture.

They think they’ve discovered a major underserved niche in the craft beer community in Columbus.

Cincinnati beer baron Greg Hardman will headline the seventh annual Ohio Brew Week in Athens. The nine-day event is filled with beer talks, special tastings and dinners with a focus on Ohio breweries. It begins Friday.

Ohio Brew Week attracts more than 20,000 people to Athens, the home of Ohio University. There are expected to be more than 200 beers to sample from 37 breweries.

Keith Jackson is the brewer at Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant in Columbus. He took over brewing duties earlier this year after brewer Chris Alltmont left for Fat Head’s Brewery. Before joining Gordon Biersch, which specialized in German-style lagers, Jackson worked for several years at Columbus Brewing Co. He’s an Ohio native and Ohio University graduate.

The Dayton Daily News has a story about the seventh annual two-day Jungle Jim's International Beer Fest, which begins today in Fairfield. The event features 350 beers from 100 breweries.

“We don’t actually want people to get intoxicated,” Jungle Jim's beer and wine operations manager Ed Vinson told the newspaper. “We feel it’s really about the experience and learning about beer, so we want people to have food in their stomachs."

Rivertown Brewing Co. in Cincinnati is releasing War, the second beer in its 2012 brewmaster’s limited release series.

The brewery describes the beer as an Irish-style smoked red ale. It's made with cherry wood smoked malt, British amber malt, two row pale ale malt and Scottish roasted barley malt. It also has spicy Bravo hops.

Horny Goat Brewing Co., located in Milwaukee, Wisc., is expanding into the Greater Cincinnati market, Stagnaro Distributing announced. The brewery was launched in January 2009 and is distributed in seven states. It already has been available in northern Ohio.

Horny Goat has three year-round brews and eight seasonals. Its first beers coming to the Cincinnati market will be Hopped Up ‘n Horny IPA, Horny Blonde and Berry Horny.

Market Garden Brewery in Cleveland turns 1 year old on Monday. The brewpub will celebrate all week, including "Festivus in June" starting June 20. The event features with a special batch of its Festivus holiday beer made just for the occasion along with kegs of Christmas beers from other craft breweries.

Santa Claus will visit from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. June 20 for photos with kids and the brewery will have ice cream. There's also the Bier Markt 5k run on Saturday. Last year, more than 700 people participated.

Mt. Carmel owners Mike and Kathleen Dewey will join Lager House brewmaster Richard Dube and Chef Carl Chambers to host the event. The dinner also will feature Mt. Carmel's limited release: Third Shift Imperial Coffee Stout. Chuck Pfahler, the artisan roaster of La Terza coffee whose beans were used in the brewing of Third Shift, also will be there.

Brad Phalin loves beer. He also loves T-shirts. Put the two together and you get beer T-shirts.

Phalin, who lives in Marblehead along Lake Erie, and partner Andrew Hemminger have launched Beer Bunny, an Internet company that's selling T-shirts featuring the words "Beer Tourist." The "o" in tourist is a snifter glass.

UPDATED: The new Fat Head's Brewery in Middleburg Heights has fired up production and is releasing its award-winning Head Hunter IPA on draft and in bottles in Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

Fat Head's, which has a brewpub in North Olmsted, built a separate production brewery because of customer demand. In a news release issued today, the brewery said it also plans to release Sunshine Daydream Session IPA, Bumble Berry Ale, Güdenhoppy Pilsner and other ales, lagers, Belgian-style ales, seasonal brews and some barrel aged beers.

Columbus Brewing Co. won the people's choice award Saturday night at the Heavyweight Brewer's Brawl at Fat Head's Brewery and Saloon in North Olmsted. The winning beer was Barrel Aged Uncle Rusty with Madagascar vanilla beans. Unfortunately, the beer was made just for special events and there isn't enough available to be sold to the public, so you won't find it at bars and restaurants.

Meanwhile, Columbus plans to launch its bottled beers in the Cleveland market in mid-July. The brewery is installing four 60-barrel fermenters that will accommodate the expansion. Columbus began selling its beer on draft in the Cleveland market earlier this year. Owner and brewer Eric Bean said that the fermenters hopefully will arrive and be installed next Friday.

Maumee Bay Brewing Co. in Toledo has created two special brews to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. The brewery made English-style and American-style ales from that period.

"We think they're pretty darn close," Oliver House general manager Neal Kovacik told the Toledo Blade. "We tried to stay true to the beer of the period through the brewing process and not filtering, using the same ingredients we could get today. Our brewers have done a lot of research, and we think they're pretty representative of what they drank then."

Pete Hilgeman is the brewer and owner of the Dayton Beer Co., a small production brewery and tasting room that opened in Kettering last month. The Dayton community has been without a craft brewery for years, and Hilgeman has reported overwhelming demand since he opened.

Neil House Brewery in Reynoldsburg is expanding its distribution to the Cleveland market. The small production brewery is releasing its Brewmaster's Select Cranberry Cider in Cleveland and hopes its beers will follow over the next couple of months, Executive Officer Shane Kelleher said. (see video and photos below)

Neil House, which also sells homebrewing supplies, has a tasting room open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday.

The Acme Fresh Market in Montrose is breaking out The Really Big Growler for The Really Big Show host Tony Rizzo.

Rizzo, who’s heard on WKNR (850-AM) in Northeast Ohio, will be the special guest at a beer tasting featuring Thirsty Dog Brewing and Great Lakes Brewing from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Friday (June 15) at the grocery store.

-- Columbus Alive! has a lengthy feature about the craft beer boom in the state capital, including individual profiles of Actual, Four String, Hoof Hearted, Seventh Son and Zauber. "The five new microbreweries are run by an assorted group — business types and academics, eccentrics and the downright hip," writes Jesse Tigges. "They all share a considerable love for beer and a desire to introduce their carefully crafted recipes to the city." To read the entire feature, click here.

The beer writer for the Appleton (Wisc.) Post Crescent newspaper has written a glowing review of Hoppin' Frog Brewery's B.O.R.I.S. the Crusher Oatmeal-Imperial Stout.

"B.O.R.I.S. stands for Bodacious Oatmeal Russian Imperial Stout and is well deserving of its 2008 and 2011 Great American Beer Festival gold medals," Beer Man Todd Haefer writes. "It has exceptional balance, with the sweetness, roast and hop notes all working in harmony with each other."

There also will be appraisers available to put a value on your beer-related memorabilia. Curt Dalton, author of The Breweries of Dayton: An Illustrated History, and Robert Musson, author of Brewing Beer in the Gem City: A History of the Brewing Industry in Dayton, Ohio, also will attend, as will descendents of the Sachs, Schwind and Hollencamp brewers who will show off some of their family collections.

The Coschocton Tribune has a story about the growth of the brewing industry in Ohio and checked in with Weasel Boy Brewing Co. in Zanesville.

"Those that like beer today are not the same as their parents," Weasel Boy brewer Jay Wince told the newspaper. "The Miller drinker who wouldn't drink Coors, the Coors drinker that wouldn't drink Miller or Budweiser. Today, people are more willing to try something new, even if they have their favorites."

Crafted Artisan Meadery, a new meadery in rural Portage County in northeast Ohio, opens to the public Saturday. The business will have a tasting room and bottles for sale. The hours will be limited at first: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturdays.

"Everything turned out great," owner Kent Waldeck said. "It turned out better than we could have hoped for in terms of quality and taste."